In the wake of the shocking victory of several Democratic Socialist candidates in the New York City primary elections, President Donald Trump is warning that the candidates are “hardcore Godless communists” and a serious threat to the United States. He received immediate pushback, not least from CNN’s chief White House correspondent Kaitlan Collins, who said that Democratic Socialist candidates are not communists. 

“While Democrats themselves have been wrestling with what Tuesday night means for the direction of their party, socialism, much less democratic socialism, is not communism,” Collins said on air earlier this week.

The same Democratic Socialists of America often identify as Marxist or Communist

Collins may have missed the fact that many of the leaders of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), belong to internal party caucuses that explicitly define themselves as Marxist and advocate for achieving communism. 

These groups control a significant portion of the DSA’s National Political Council, the body responsible for governing the party, according to a review of party records, social media posts, and caucus platforms. In fact, 10 members of the 25-person body belong to a caucus that espouses communism or have explicitly supported the ideology in public statements.  

Mayor Zohran Mamdani, also a member of the DSA, has supported radical proposals, including abolishing prisons, ending deportations, implementing Medicare for all, and creating federal job guarantees.

One of the nominees, Darializa Avila Chevalier, reportedly maintained a Twitter account for years that expressed support for communism and Marxist ideology, including sympathy for Soviet figures. 

Not much of a secret

Many of the DSA’s leaders make no secret of their ultimate goals, including achieving a communist revolution in the United States. One of the party’s co-chairs, Megan Romer, is a member of the Red Star caucus of the DSA, which explicitly pronounces its ultimate aim: the overthrow of capitalism in the U.S. and, eventually, attaining communism. That caucus states on its web page that "We understand Marxism as a living, breathing theoretical framework, which is not and never can be a static set of dogmas. We see Marxism as the foundational and most informative lens through which to understand the workings of capitalism."

“Red Star is a Marxist-Leninist caucus in DSA. Our primary goal, the goal which informs all of our organizing work, is to abolish capitalism and, ultimately, to achieve communism,” the caucus’s ‘Points of Unity’ reads. “We do not believe that capitalism can be reformed into socialism – it must be overthrown and replaced.”

The Red Star caucus seeks to “cohere a vanguard party,” a core concept in the writings of Vladimir Lenin, the Russian revolutionary leader of the Bolshevik Party who overthrew that country’s monarchy in the aftermath of World War I. Lenin posited that workers would never spontaneously rise up to demand a socialist revolution and would only demand better wages. Instead, he believed that an organized party dedicated to the overthrow of capitalism would have to take the reins to guide a revolution.

Red Star’s goal is to build toward a “Revolutionary Situation,” like the Russian Revolution, that would bring about the end of capitalism in the United States.  

Communist cult icons praised

While she served on the DSA NPC, Romer promoted the writings of Vladimir Lenin, the founder of the Soviet Union, Ho Chi Minh, the communist leader of Vietnam, and Che Guevara, the Latin American militant figure who played a prominent role in the Cuban Revolution.

“Come read Lenin, Ho Chi Minh, Che Guevara, and (of course, I picked the readings myself) Marta Harnecker and talk about the theoretical basis for mass protagonism and collective member/cadre/organizer development,” she posted to Bluesky, a social media platform, in July 2025. 

In April this year, Romer met with representatives of the French Communist Party and spoke at the European Left conference in Belgium. 

In addition to Romer, two other members of the DSA NPC are members of the Red Star caucus. 

Not the only overtly Marxist caucus in the DSA 

Members of the Bread & Roses and the Marxist Unity Group (MUG) caucuses also serve on the NPC. Both groups, like Red Star, advocate for communism both by name and by implication. MUG's webpage declares that it is "an organization committed to political struggle within the Democratic Socialists of America. This makes us a DSA faction, and we aim to be a constructive one. Our words "Marxist Unity" are aspirational: we hope to rally the thousands of Marxists in DSA around a shared vision for our movement’s future."

Three other members of the current DSA committee belong to the Marxist Unity Group, which also openly calls for achieving communism in the United States and speaks glowingly of the ideology that guided the Soviet Union.  

The DSA did not respond to a request for comment. 

On May Day (May 1), or International Workers’ Day, Marxist Unity Group NPC member Chris Connolly retweeted a post on X commemorating “comrades” murdered in the Spanish Civil War (“anarchists and communists both”), the Bolsheviks killed by monarchists in the Russian Civil War, the veterans of Chinese Communist leader Mao Zedong’s Long March in the Chinese Civil War, and the revolutionaries who seized power in the Cuban Revolution. 

"Redistribution, expropriation, and democratic reform of state institutions"

Other caucuses, like Bread & Roses and the Libertarian Socialists, both explicitly and implicitly advocate for communism. Bread & Roses boasts three members in the DSA leadership. Though the caucus’s website does not explicitly mention communism, it calls for a radical redistribution of wealth–apparently by force. 

“And since no ruling class has ever peacefully ceded power, in a transitional period, a socialist government backed by popular mobilizations will have to do everything necessary to defend the mandate they have won to carry out a program of redistribution, expropriation, and democratic reform of state institutions,” Bread & Roses says. 

The Libertarian Socialist caucus describes itself as “a political home within the Democratic Socialists of America for all socialists who are opposed to the state,” including “libertarian socialists, libertarian Marxists, anarchists, left communists,” and other ideologies on the left-wing of the socialist movement. 

The caucus boasts one member of the national committee, David Jenkins, who outlined the broad goal of the DSA as such: “Our goal is liberation. Our goal is communism.”